


Night Terrors and Old Scars

by GhostyBat



Category: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016), Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs
Genre: Family Feels, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Night Terrors
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:35:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23059351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GhostyBat/pseuds/GhostyBat
Summary: When Millard begins to suffer from nightmares, they are just dreams after all, dreams never hurt anybody so whats the point in sharing it with the world. If Emma and Horace want to pester him about them, thats their problem. If Horace can mangage, so could he.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 27





	1. Sleep Paralysis

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is something I've had in mind for a while now, I'm still working it out but I think it has a lot of potential. Make sure to leave a comment and tell me what you think~

When Millard woke up, he knew something was wrong. His body felt asleep, the uncomfortable pins and needles feeling danced across his limbs and chest. His eyes were open, and he could blink but otherwise he was still stuck in place. He could hear Horace snoring in the bed across him, but Enoch was suspiciously quiet. Millard couldn’t turn his head to look but his guess was that he was down in the basement again, he preferred to work during the ungodly hours of the night. 

_Sleep paralysis, _he confirmed in his mind. This was exciting, he had always wondered about it. Horace had told him about the phenomenon, though Millard himself had never experienced it. What was there to expect? Well, creepy crawlies in the room, maybe some difficulty breathing, monsters climbing through windows, discomfort, at least that's what Horace had said.__

____

____

“My dreams have no connection to them, “ he would say huffily, as though offended at his peculiar ability being compared to something so common, “They are just hallucinations caused by stress or lack of sleep. Pure imagination nonsense.” That still didn’t stop Horace from complaining of them, clearly his ability made him more susceptible to dream-related affinities. Except nothing was happening, other than the tingly legs and inability to move, this was just like laying in bed and staring at the ceiling. 

But really, Millard hadn’t expected much. He didn’t believe that he could be scared by his own consciousness, Horace tended to exaggerate so one had to take his opinion on what was “scary” with a grain of salt. Horace’s idea of scary was a fringed pant leg. 

A muffled bump came from the door and it swung inward with enough force to make it hit the wall. Enoch stumbled through, moving about like a zombie. He grumbled to himself and scowled at the window, clumsily making his way across the room to throw the blinds together, the room became pitch black. Millard heard Enoch grunt, then the sound of the bed groaning as he jumped on top of it. Loud snores echoed back a moment later, he hadn’t even bothered to take off his shoes. 

_Gross._

____

____

Millard lay there, stewing in how angry he would be in the morning, Enoch’s death fragrance would stink up the whole room and The Bird was going to go stark raving mad and make them clean the whole damn place. 

A crash came from Enoch’s corner of the room. 

Then laughter, dull and raspy. The laughter faded into soft humming then back to giggles. 

_That's not real. None of this is real. I'm just dreaming._

____

____

Millard couldn’t turn his head to look at his imaginary creature. It was imaginary after all, it just so happened that Millard had an excellent imagination, a side effect of incredible intelligence, clearly. The footsteps continued to cross the room and Millard felt the man, or monster, beside him. He felt a hot breath on his face. Just a nightmare. The floor creaked as the thing leaned over the bed. White eyes and a thin beard, blood leaked out of a hole in its neck and onto a fine suit underneath. 

The man smiled at him pleasantly, salt water poured from the gaps in his teeth, “Keep telling yourself that.” Blood dripped onto Millard’s chest, soaking into his pajamas and leaving a stain across his midsection. 

_He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s-_

____

____

The man grabbed his shoulder, squeezing it gently. His nails were digging into the scar on Millard’s shoulder. 

_Stop._

____

____

The pressure increased. He broke skin. 

And then there was screaming.


	2. Chapter 2

“You were loud as hell last night. You toss and turn like a beached whale.” Enoch quipped, digging through the fridge, “Bad dreams?”  


Millard nursed his coffee bitterly, he should’ve ditched his pajamas. Now he had to deal with this. That's what he gets for being lazy. Maybe if he just ignored Enoch, the twerp would shut up.  


Enoch emerged from the fridge with a tortilla hanging out of his mouth like a limp cigar, glaring at Millard suspiciously, “Nothing clever to say? Whatever.” He reached for the coffee pot only to find it empty. Only sad drops remained at the bottom of the pot. “Did you drink all the coffee? There were like, ten cups in there!”  
He didn’t say it with concern, he said it more like a drug addict who has awoken to find that all his goods had been whisked away in the night. It wasn’t too far from the truth, Enoch was hooked rather awfully on caffeine. Miss Peregrine really needed to hold an intervention for multiple people in this house.  


“I specifically made that so I could have it right away in the morning!” Enoch bit off a large chunk of his “breakfast” and chewed it furiously, throwing his hands about in a huff, “Unbelievable. People in this house I swear…”  


He began to mutter, stomping back to the fridge to snatch a can of redbull from his stash in the back of the fridge. He popped it open and took loud slurps while sneering at Millard, who made no comment. Enoch was really angered more about being ignored than the coffee but he wouldn’t admit that.  


“Are you drinking red bull at five am.” Horace walked into the kitchen. He was fully dressed, a finely pressed navy blue coat over a white undershirt, dress shoes tied in perfect knots and socks folded neatly over them, hair combed and gelled perfectly, and signature monocle overlapping the ever present dark circles under his eyes.  


“Invisible boy over there drank all the goddamn coffee.”  


Horace’s face scrunched up into a frown as he regarded Millard and his offending cup with tired venom,“You don’t even _like coffee.”  
_

_thought Millard as he took another sip of the putrid liquid. His shoulder throbbed angrily as he picked up the cup. He refused to believe that some stupid nightmare affected his physical body, he was just imagining the pain and it would go away if he kept using it. Feeling pain after dreams was uncommon, but not impossible, he had just read five articles about it and after that he had read about ten more on sleep paralysis.  
_

_Horace too stalked over to the fridge to grab a redbull. At least he grabbed an apple to go along with it. That’s called a “balanced diet”.  
_

_“Oi! That’s my property!”  
_

_“Stuff it, you drank mine last week.”  
_

_How those two could survive on nothing but pure caffeine and irritation Millard couldn’t fathom. This blasted coffee wasn’t even curing his exhaustion, it just made him tremble all over and make his stomach hurt. He was a tea guy himself, and it had never done him wrong this way. In all fairness he had probably gone over the portion size just a tad.  
As the two younger boys continued to bicker, Millard sat up and set his cup in the sink with a quiet clink, sulking away to go change out of those pajamas, he didn’t want to deal with people today._


End file.
